Gen mountain

Meaning

Gen, 艮 gèn, is the middle mountain of the north-east (NE2): the fifteen degrees from 37.5° to 52.5°, centred on 45°, the exact north-east. It takes its name from the trigram Gen ☶, the Mountain, which holds the whole north-east in the Later Heaven order: these are its middle fifteen degrees, the corner itself.

Gen is the north-east itself, 45°, the middle of the corner, named after the trigram of the mountain, stillness and the pause in which things settle. Its trigram holds the whole north-east in the Later Heaven order, and the mountain is its heart, between the Ox’s Chou and the Tiger’s Yin. A home facing Gen looks due north-east and sits in Kun, the south-west: a Kun house, the trigram of the earth at its back as the trigram of the mountain is ahead.

For the Flying Stars Gen is the north-east’s Heaven dragon and counts as yang, like Yin beside it, so the two share their main chart. Built in Period 8, a home facing Gen had the reversed chart, the period’s mountain star at the front and its water star at the back, softened, the classics say, by the parent string, with a 5 flying forward that repeats the Lo Shu; built in Period 9, it has both of the period’s stars at the front. The prosperous chart comes to Gen in Periods 4 and 6.

In practice

• The facing: a home whose front faces between 37.5° and 52.5° faces Gen, and sits in Kun, SW2: a Kun house of the West group. The Home lens tints Gen on its dial and draws Kun dashed.
• Near its edges: within 3° of 37.5° or 52.5° many schools read a replacement chart, which Ulune shows beside the main one; within 1.5° the facing is on a void line: at 37.5° the line towards Chou, inside the north-east; at 52.5° the line towards Yin, inside the north-east.
• The Flying Stars: built in Period 9, a home facing Gen has the formation Double stars at the facing; built in Period 8, the formations Reversed, Parent string and Repeated chart.
• The year: Gen is never the Grand Duke’s mountain nor the Year Breaker’s, which are branches, nor one of the Three Killings, which fall in the four cardinal directions. The year’s 5 Yellow visits its palace, the north-east, in 2025 and 2034.

Across traditions

• The solar terms: on luopan plates that carry a ring of the solar terms, Gen goes with the Start of Spring, the Sun at 315°, halfway through Aquarius in the Western zodiac.
• In Vastu Shastra the north-east belongs to Ishana, a form of Shiva, and is kept for prayer and for water; on the Mediterranean rose it is the grecale, the wind from Greece.
• The four starts: on the ring of terms the four corners carry the beginnings of the seasons, Gen the start of spring, Xun of summer, Kun of autumn and Qian of winter, while the solstices and the equinoxes fall on the four directions’ middle mountains.

Origin and history

The Shuo Gua, the Book of Changes’ discussion of the trigrams, calls Gen the trigram of the north-east, where all things end and where they begin. The ring of terms takes the words literally: Lichun, the start of spring, from which BaZi and Feng Shui count the solar year and a Kua is reckoned, falls in Gen, three terms after the winter solstice at Zi. Ulune’s own year turns there too, for the Kua and for the stars of the years.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune finds the mountain a home faces from its magnetic facing, among 24 mountains of 15° counted from Ren at 337.5°: Gen takes every facing from 37.5° up to 52.5°, that edge belonging to the next, and the home sits in the mountain opposite, Kun. For the Flying Stars, Gen is the middle mountain of a corner palace, of the group the classics call the Heaven dragon, and so counts as yang: when the stars look to it for their flight, it sends a star forward. Its replacement star, from the classical verse, is 7, which takes the place of the number going to the centre when, near an edge, it is the mountain that decides.

Correspondences